Shirin

I’m grateful to David Bordwell, one of the world’s greatest and most wide-ranging scholars of cinema, for sending word about Abbas Kiarostami’s film “Shirin,” from 2007, which I referred to last week. I haven’t seen the film; David has, and has also written about it, trenchantly, on the blog that he shares with Kristin Thompson. He describes the film:

After a credit sequence presenting the classic tale Khosrow and Shirin in a swift series of drawings, the film severs sound from image. What we hear over the next 85 minutes is an enactment of the tale, with actors, music, and effects. But we don’t see it at all. What we see are about 200 shots of female viewers, usually in single close-ups, with occasionally some men visible behind or on the screen edge. The women are looking more or less straight at the camera, and we infer that they’re reacting to the drama as we hear it.

This may seem strangely undramatic, but a viewing of Kiarostami’s cognate short film “Where Is My Romeo?,” which I posted last week, suggests the unusual emotional power and the political implications of the method. Here’s one of many extraordinary observations in his post:

I once asked Kiarostami how he got the remarkable performances in shot/reverse-shot that we see in films like “Through the Olive Trees” and “The Taste of Cherry.” He said that he simply filmed one actor saying all his lines and giving all his reactions, then filmed the other. Often the two actors were never present at the same time, especially when he shot the car sequences. This montage-based approach, creating a synthetic space simply by cutting, has been taken to an extreme in “Shirin,” where the soundtrack supplies the reverse shot we never see. We’re told that Kiarostami filmed his female actors here reacting to dots on a board above the camera! Indeed, Kiarostami claims he decided on the “Shirin” story after filming the faces.

Now that we’ve got this teaser, which arouses cinematic desire as surely as any trailer or clip, let’s hope that we’ll soon get to see the movie; to the best of my knowledge, it hasn’t yet played in New York.

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